Graprefruit Juice

Ron Goulart returns with another entry in his biographical series on Connecticut cartoonists. This time, his focus is on Walt Kelly.

Years later Kelly expressed some doubts on the value of the classes he had attended [at Walt Disney Studios], but he was considerably tipsy on that occasion and his negative side took hold of him. His thoughts on that topic emerged at the November 1969 National Cartoonists Society annual banquet, in an interview by Gil Kane with a large group of his fellow cartoonists in the audience. After getting a few sullen and whimsical answers, Kane stopped in the middle of his fourth question and said, “This isn’t going to work.” But Kelly replied, “You said you has a hell of a lot of good questions to ask me and I want to hear one of them.” Reluctantly Kane continued and asked, “I was wondering if there was some turning point, something that influenced your very substantial attention to craft. No kidding, now.”

Kelly’s response was ambivalent. “Hunger. I mean, here you were starving to death, working for Disney. Disney was a good training school in that the people he had working for him the best cartoonists that I have ever seen in a group….[But] even out there, not all of them were good. Some of them were terrible.”

Sometimes in Gfrorer’s work, men are raped. This is something that happens in life with tragic frequency, but it is not something depicted in art or media too often, or too well. Of course the rape of women by men is very common, and in art and media too. We are not afraid to suggest women are victimised by men. When man’s rapes feature, the rapist is often a fellow male and the victim commonly queer; otherwise he may be a heterosexual who becomes subject to fears about their own sexuality subsequent to their rape by a man. In this way, fictitious rape of men is often kept reserved from a reader’s ideas about men’s heterosexual relations. Gfrorer prefers to consider rape of men directly within the realm of heterosexual intimacy; Gfrorer’s art contrarily positions women and vaginas as potentially rapacious, and the heterosexual, male penis as their prey.

If I really want to get my shit together and impress someone, I can make a gnocchi from scratch. I can follow a recipe and sometimes get it right, but in my day-to-day life, I don’t cook that much. I have a couple of dishes I make over and over again. I’ll throw stuff in the rice cooker, but I eat more to just fuel myself. My boyfriend makes fun of me because for lunch I’ll just have a hard boiled egg and some crackers and a hand full of olives and a pickle. He’s like, “You’re eating like a baby.”

I tried to tweet my comics about him at [Justin Bieber], but basically I didn’t want to turn my Twitter into a spam account. He has so many followers, the chances of him seeing it would be super low. But he does share fan art! Only most of the time, and it’s done by, like, a really adorable 13-year-old fan, and honestly the art is really shitty. So I get mad he hasn’t shared what I’m doing in, like, art college.

My mom tells me I’m going to be really famous and “we will meet and work together as peers.” [Laughs]

We go because we’d be conspicuous by our absence, and we have fans who really do appreciate us being there. We’re sort of an oasis in this sea of shit.

For Print, Michael Dooley talks to Tosh Berman about his father Wallace Berman, and the importance of Flash Gordon to his art.

It’s a generational thing. A lot of artists in my dad’s generation loved comics, and I think not really the comic book, but the comics that appeared in the newspaper. All those artists are basically the same generation, so the main medium was the comic strip.

I think one can argue the influence of the comic strip on a lot of artists, but especially on artists from a certain era and time, and maybe place. Warhol, I’m sure, felt the same way about comics as my dad. Kenneth Anger again, same generation. I don’t think the comic strip would be that great of an influence if the artist was born in the 1950s. So, right time, right place for these particular artists.